31 December 2009

Where Does All That CO2 Come From?

CO2 sources world-wide are plotted on Google Earth by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency's Emission Database for Global Research (EDGAR). "The shown grid size is a tenth of a geographical degree of latitude by the same extension in longitude, or simplified, a circa 10 km x 10 km square, roughly the size of central Paris." You can tease emissions out by sector, and have lots more fun seeing who is responsible for emissions where.


Black on the image indicates more than 250 Gg CO2 equivalent per grid square. Yellow along roads and sea-lanes is 2.5-5.0 Gg CO2 equiv. per grid square. (One Gg is one thousand tonnes.) If the square is black where your house is, you and your neighbors are putting out more than 250 tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution per square kilometer per year. Probably a lot more.


[Originally written by Doc for, and crossposted from the HaraBara blog]

23 December 2009

Where does all that CO2 Go?

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising, as we all know. When I learned it in high school it was said to be 320 parts per million. Now it is higher. But this NASA animation, based on seven years of data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder satellite instruments, shows the dynamic changes over time and space. (I don't think the colors used to represent higher concentrations are deliberately chosen to be frightening--it's just convention. But they do pack an emotional punch that a more neutral color scheme would avoid.)


The superimposed graph is the CO2 concentration measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. (If you can't see the video watch it here on YouTube.)

The popular understanding of the "greenhouse effect" is that greenhouse gases act like a blanket to keep heat from escaping from the Earth. This is incorrect. Greenhouse gases absorb radiation and heat up. They radiate some of that heat away, as any hot body would. Some of it goes out into space, and some is radiated down toward the surface, where some of it can be absorbed to make the surface warmer. It is more like an electric blanket than an insulating blanket. The more greenhouse gases there are, the more radiation they absorb and the hotter they get, and this changes Earth's temperature and climate.

There are more interesting NASA videos and graphics here.

[Originally written by Doc for, and crossposted from the HaraBara blog]

22 December 2009

How not to negotiate carbon reduction

The failure of the 15th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to come to any conclusion whatever in Copenhagen is chilling, but it was to be expected. Could 192 countries large and small, each with a veto, unanimously agree on anything in this difficult area? (See comments in this Daily Brief.)

The alternative, for the biggest current and future emitters to negotiate among themselves to try to agree on ways to move off the untenable "business as usual" projections, achieved some modest progress. Presumably these negotiations will continue and carbon emissions will gradually move off the "worst case" path. But probably not enough to keep total global temperature increases below 2°C. Some effects of processes already under way are unavoidable, and for some they will be catastrophic. But there is no way to turn back the clock.

Fortunately there is not a complete disconnect between big emitters and those affected by climate change. We hear a lot about the potential displacement of coastal-dwellers in Bangladesh, but there are many times more people, and much more wealth, exposed to rising sea levels in China as in Bangladesh. China, India, and the U.S. are finally talking about the need to develop mutually acceptable emission targets of some sort, though decades have been wasted getting to this degree of agreement.

There will continue to be tension between the "we are all in one boat" view and the national interests of each negotiator. And not enough can be done to even pretend to be able to save some doomed nations and regions. But something will be done. It just won't be done by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

07 December 2009

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency. [Reprinted from The Guardian under Creative Commons license.]


Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation' by The Guardian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Based on a work at guardian.co.uk.